The rapid development and large body of literature on machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) can make it difficult to know how to proceed for researchers who are not experts but wish to use these tools. The spirit of this review is to help such researchers by serving as a practical, accessible guide to the state-of-the-art in MLIPs. This review paper covers a broad range of topics related to MLIPs, including (i) central aspects of how and why MLIPs are enablers of many exciting advancements in molecular modeling, (ii) the main underpinnings of different types of MLIPs, including their basic structure and formalism, (iii) the potentially transformative impact of universal MLIPs for both organic and inorganic systems, including an overview of the most recent advances, capabilities, downsides, and potential applications of this nascent class of MLIPs, (iv) a practical guide for estimating and understanding the execution speed of MLIPs, including guidance for users based on hardware availability, type of MLIP used, and prospective simulation size and time, (v) a manual for what MLIP a user should choose for a given application by considering hardware resources, speed requirements, energy and force accuracy requirements, as well as guidance for choosing pre-trained potentials or fitting a new potential from scratch, (vi) discussion around MLIP infrastructure, including sources of training data, pre-trained potentials, and hardware resources for training, (vii) summary of some key limitations of present MLIPs and current approaches to mitigate such limitations, including methods of including long-range interactions, handling magnetic systems, and treatment of excited states, and finally (viii) we finish with some more speculative thoughts on what the future holds for the development and application of MLIPs over the next 3-10+ years.

The recent advent of autonomous laboratories, coupled with algorithms for high-throughput screening and active learning, promises to accelerate materials discovery and innovation. As these autonomous systems grow in complexity, the demand for robust and efficient workflow management software becomes increasingly critical. In this paper, we introduce AlabOS, a general-purpose software framework for orchestrating experiments and managing resources, with an emphasis on automated laboratories for materials synthesis and characterization. We demonstrate the implementation of AlabOS in a prototype autonomous materials laboratory. AlabOS features a reconfigurable experiment workflow model, enabling the simultaneous execution of varied workflows composed of modular tasks. Therefore, AlabOS is well-suited to handle the rapidly changing experimental protocols defining the progress of self-driving laboratory development for materials research.

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have introduced a new paradigm for atomic simulations. Recent advancements have seen the emergence of universal MLIPs (uMLIPs) that are pre-trained on diverse materials datasets, providing opportunities for both ready-to-use universal force fields and robust foundations for downstream machine learning refinements. However, their performance in extrapolating to out-of-distribution complex atomic environments remains unclear. In this study, we highlight a consistent potential energy surface (PES) softening effect in three uMLIPs: M3GNet, CHGNet, and MACE-MP-0, which is characterized by energy and force under-prediction in a series of atomic-modeling benchmarks including surfaces, defects, solid-solution energetics, phonon vibration modes, ion migration barriers, and general high-energy states. We find that the PES softening behavior originates from a systematic underprediction error of the PES curvature, which derives from the biased sampling of near-equilibrium atomic arrangements in uMLIP pre-training datasets. We demonstrate that the PES softening issue can be effectively rectified by fine-tuning with a single additional data point. Our findings suggest that a considerable fraction of uMLIP errors are highly systematic, and can therefore be efficiently corrected. This result rationalizes the data-efficient fine-tuning performance boost commonly observed with foundational MLIPs. We argue for the importance of a comprehensive materials dataset with improved PES sampling for next-generation foundational MLIPs.

The simulation of large-scale systems with complex electron interactions remains one of the greatest challenges for the atomistic modeling of materials. Although classical force fields often fail to describe the coupling between electronic states and ionic rearrangements, the more accurate \textit{ab-initio} molecular dynamics suffers from computational complexity that prevents long-time and large-scale simulations, which are essential to study many technologically relevant phenomena, such as reactions, ion migrations, phase transformations, and degradation. In this work, we present the Crystal Hamiltonian Graph neural Network (CHGNet) as a novel machine-learning interatomic potential (MLIP), using a graph-neural-network-based force field to model a universal potential energy surface. CHGNet is pretrained on the energies, forces, stresses, and magnetic moments from the Materials Project Trajectory Dataset, which consists of over 10 years of density functional theory static and relaxation trajectories of $\sim 1.5$ million inorganic structures. The explicit inclusion of magnetic moments enables CHGNet to learn and accurately represent the orbital occupancy of electrons, enhancing its capability to describe both atomic and electronic degrees of freedom. We demonstrate several applications of CHGNet in solid-state materials, including charge-informed molecular dynamics in Li$_x$MnO$_2$, the finite temperature phase diagram for Li$_x$FePO$_4$ and Li diffusion in garnet conductors. We critically analyze the significance of including charge information for capturing appropriate chemistry, and we provide new insights into ionic systems with additional electronic degrees of freedom that can not be observed by previous MLIPs.

Synthesis prediction is a key accelerator for the rapid design of advanced materials. However, determining synthesis variables such as the choice of precursor materials is challenging for inorganic materials because the sequence of reactions during heating is not well understood. In this work, we use a knowledge base of 29,900 solid-state synthesis recipes, text-mined from the scientific literature, to automatically learn which precursors to recommend for the synthesis of a novel target material. The data-driven approach learns chemical similarity of materials and refers the synthesis of a new target to precedent synthesis procedures of similar materials, mimicking human synthesis design. When proposing five precursor sets for each of 2,654 unseen test target materials, the recommendation strategy achieves a success rate of at least 82%. Our approach captures decades of heuristic synthesis data in a mathematical form, making it accessible for use in recommendation engines and autonomous laboratories.

Abstract--Although gold nanorods have been the subject of much research, the pathways for controlling their shape and thereby their optical properties remain largely heuristically understood. Although it is apparent that the simultaneous presence of and interaction between various reagents during synthesis control these properties, computational and experimental approaches for exploring the synthesis space can be either intractable or too time-consuming in practice. This motivates an alternative approach leveraging the wealth of synthesis information already embedded in the body of scientific literature by developing tools to extract relevant structured data in an automated, high-throughput manner. To that end, we present an approach using the powerful GPT-3 language model to extract structured multi-step seed-mediated growth procedures and outcomes for gold nanorods from unstructured scientific text. GPT-3 prompt completions are finetuned to predict synthesis templates in the form of JSON documents from unstructured text input with an overall accuracy of 86%. The performance is notable, considering the model is performing simultaneous entity recognition and relation extraction. We present a dataset of 11,644 entities extracted from 1,137 papers, resulting in 268 papers with at least one complete seed-mediated gold nanorod growth procedure and outcome for a total of 332 complete procedures. In the last three semiconductor technology,[11, 12] biomedicine,[13, 14] and decades, chemists have developed the ability to synthesize cosmetics.[15] The suitability of a nanoparticle for a particular anisotropic metal nanoparticles in a controllable and re-application depends on its morphology and size, which correspond to different plasmonic properties.[16,

This completion can be formatted as either English sentences or a more structured schema such as a list of JSON documents. Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 [12], PaLM To use this method, one only has to define the desired [25], Megatron [26], OPT [27], Gopher [28], and FLAN [29] output structure--for example, a list of JSON objects with a have been shown to have remarkable ability to leverage semantic predefined set of keys--and annotate 100 500 text passages information between tokens in natural language sequences using this format. GPT-3 is then fine-tuned on these of varying length. They are particularly adept at examples, and the resulting model is able to accurately extract sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) tasks, where a text input is desired information from text and output information in used to seed a text response from the model. In this paper the same structured representation as shown in Figure 1.